The Race Gallery: The Return of Racial Science by Marek Kohn Jonathan Cape $306 SINCE the Cold War ended, a multitude of vicious tribal wars have sprung up throughout the world. The years of slaughter in Bosnia and Rwanda have given us a new term in the lexicon of human folly: ethnocentric nationalism.
Under the new dispensation, conflicts, it seemed, would no longer be driven by the clash of political philosophies. What mattered now was blood. On what side of the dividing line you stood depended on your parents. Children were attacked by mortar in Europe, by machete in Africa, but the thought behind the deed was the same.
It is Marek Kohn's argument that violent racial prejudice does not simply spring from nowhere. The evil ideology of the Nazis in Germany was not an aberration in the thought of Western man. Instead, it is seen as the last stop on the line of what was then a respected branch of science that originated with Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton.
Galton believed that human beings could be improved if different sections of the population bred at different rates. It was not much of a step from there to try to classify the different types or races of man.
In the final third of the 19th century, scientists measured the facial dimensions of some 25 million Europeans. The angle of the nose to the forehead, the ratio of the width of the head to its length, all were considered vital signs of a person's racial character - and their destiny. The railway journey to Auschwitz beckoned.
Kohn tells us how scientists, after the Allied victory over Nazi Germany, turned anti-racist, with anthropologists, archaeologists, linguists and geneticists all keen to disprove the ideas that had caused the world such misery.
The homo sapien, they said, was too subtle an animal to be measured by his or her bones. They endorsed new ways of measuring the variety of human beings, such as the prevalence of different types of protein in the blood. Scientists almost universally agreed that it was a crude barbarism to try to classify man into different racial sub-types.